The end of everything. Or at least 2020.

I often still long for the life I had a year ago. It is sadly amusing to look at the posts from earlier in my time here. I had more optimism. I don't feel that so much now. I wonder what I'm doing here. I feel permanently out of sync.

I made it through the solitary holidays with some help from Zoom and a lot of help from my online friends. Had a rough Boxing Day, I think the strain finally got to me on that day. I'm lonely but not willing to really do a lot to prevent that. My dating really escalated in the fall and I met someone who I knew wasn't right for me but I went ahead anyway. I finally was able to break things off while it was still relatively easy to extricate myself. I've stopped seriously looking for a partner. I think the whole dating thing was an attempt to create the appearance of normality, but it was similar to a drunken man trying to walk extra carefully during a sobriety test. I was not fooling anyone other than myself.
I mainly look for friends on the dating sites now. I have one friend with whom I have chatted almost this entire time, we finally met in November and that was nice. Work still isn't so great, but apparently it doesn't matter.

Self expression is really what's getting me through. I don't write as much as I once did, obviously, but I do other things. Maybe I will try to get back to writing in 2021.

This is my life now. It's hard for me to accept. I feel like I've gone backward and forward in time simultaneously. My lifestyle has become the same as 20 years ago, but I am 20 years older. As far as what 2021 holds...who knows. Thank you for being there, Imaginary [and maybe not so imaginary] Reader.

Ash Monday

Survived the fires--they put us on evacuation level 1, which means it's possible you might be evacuated, but never went further. Level 2 is you will will probably be evacuated, and level 3 is get out now. I started packing just in case, but things were better by Friday and today they moved us completely off to level 0 which is just normal life I guess. There's still smoke everywhere and I can't go outside. I tried a few times and couldn't tolerate it.

Been drinking a bit too much, at least during Labor Day weekend, but have slowed down since then. My problem is I enjoy walking around outside and going to different beer gardens, and by the time I get to the third one I am a bit tipsy, though I'm trying to just drink less or lighter things. I at least get a lot of exercise this way. I've lost interest in my old walking paths I used to take. There's something depressing about it.

Work is an absurdist comedy and it's doubtful it will ever change. At least I have a job.

The writing has been going okay. More poetry again, and making videos and even songs. Still doing OKCupid. Been on a few dates, nothing that has really stuck. Only one bad experience so far, but that was on Bumble which I ended up having to delete. Not sure if I really want to get serious yet, but feel like I should at least make an attempt to date in case something happens that I would otherwise miss out on. At least it's social interaction. I'd probably be happy with some close friends, but that's never seemed to be something that I was particularly good at. I'm way better at online friendship.

I feel like I'm a kinder person than I used to be at least.

Holiness or Hell, Pt. 2.

The man’s breath smelled. He put his hand on my shoulder and prayed….

My church camp xperience was in 1984. Twelve years later, I had just moved out on my own and was staring my career with the Post Office. As is often the case when small town people have kids moving to the big city, my parents tried to connect me with people they knew—relatives of someone who went to our church, a friend of my grandmother’s. They'd invited me to church that Sunday...they attended a church that was affiliated with a semi-major televangelist, which was super common in Tulsa back in the 90s. I attended the morning service with them, had lunch with them, and ended up returning that night [Pentecostal churches are big on going to church on Sunday night, it's usually when they cut loose.]

Looking back, I can really understand how a lot of these churches operate. They break you down, tire you out, and then try to push you into certain actions. You stand and sing for hours, then the pastor gives his message. I remember they'd sing this song where they'd talk about "Blood and Fire...we call upon blood and fire...a stream flowing strong...it's flowing from heaven." They'd sing for at least an hour or two, and you'd stand the whole time. AFter the pastor spoke, you'd stand yet again while they try to get you to come forward. They appeal to the sick who want healing. They appeal to those who feel the need to confess and be forgiven. And they appeal to the lonely. They often call this “the altar call”, though in this case we were meeting in a convention center and there was no actual altar.

In Pentecostal type churches, people often believe that God can give them special abilities, almost like powers. They’re called “the gifts of the Spirit.” Though this sounds very strange to everyone else, for someone growing up in the church it didn’t seem unusual at all. Someone would give “a message” in tongues, which would just sound like someone speaking in a foreign language. Our pastor had “the gift of interpretation,” and after several moments, he would say what the message meant. That night, it was my turn to break down, at least sort of. The man sitting next to me put his hand on my shoulder. He told me "You've got some heavy burdens there." He prayed for a moment, and then turned to his wife, who laid her hands on me as well. "You have a spirit of rejection that has been following you since you were a little boy." The man asked me, "Would you like to receive the Holy Ghost?"

I've been in that situation before, and it is almost impossible to resist. I wasn't able to do it now. It was not like the time at church camp. He simply prayed and then asked me to just speak. I figured he would be able to tell I wasn't really doing it, but I made sounds with my mouth. He was none the wiser, and got all excited, and told his wife, "This young mans just received the Holy Spirit!"

I felt like a fraud, but I told my parents I had been filled with the Spirit, and they of course were very happy, as was my grandmother. I started attending that church, mainly in the hopes of meeting people. I joined the group for young people my age, but as usual, didn't really fit with the people there. I knew people kind of gave me the side eye when I'd speak in tongues. I soon stopped. I eventually quit going to church at all, when it became obvious I really didn't belong there.

I don't really have an explanation for what happened---other than I was a young person and probably looked pretty downtrodden so it might have been an easy guess to think I had the problems the couple at the church thought I had. They believed in it. Mass hysteria is a powerful thing, we see it more and more these days. I think the way my brain works though, I could never give myself fully to whatever it was. Years later, I tried attending a non-Pentecostal type church, though I didnt fit in there either, though I at least didn't constantly feel pressure to display spiritual ecstasies.

I don't regret it, because it makes for an interesting story. Like most things that have happened to me in my life. I still wonder though if I might end up in the Devil's Hell....

The Birthday Party

Not the band, though I love them a lot.

My birthday was today. I was alone, but that was fine by me. I actually enjoy my own company and though it would have been fun to spend some time with a couple of the recent acquaintances in my life, I had a fine time on my own. Like many people, I consider my birthday to be basically New Year's. This last year has been a turbulent one to say the least, even if you ignore everything happening in the larger world. Let's be frank. I'm in the process of divorce and moved to a new city a few months ago, took a new job, basically had a lot of major life changes. Had to get used to living alone again. I feel like I've gotten through it really well. I discovered I enjoy living alone. I started dating/chatting online and have made friends all over the world. I've started new types of creative projects I've never done before. In so many ways, life has never been better. My job kind of leaves something to be desired, just due to typical shitty government job onboarding, but that's to be expected.

At any rate, I had fun today, visiting new parts of the city, taking photos, petting a dog, and drinking a lot. Then chatting with friends online. I've been casually dating and I'm sure there will be more of that in the future, but I'm perfectly fine with myself right now. So there....

The Joe Jackson girlfriend

When I was in high school, I had the idea that someday I would become a corporate lawyer and move to a big city such as New York. I listened to far too many Joe Jackson records in 9th grade--not the early ones that everyone knows, but the later ones like "Body and Soul" and "Big World." I'd listen to the instrument "Loisaida" repeatedly and imagine what I thought my life would be like in 15 years or so. I knew I'd have some kind of girlfriend that was some kind of professional and we'd go to fancy parties and it would look like the opening montage of Saturday Night Live [the one they had back in the late 80s.] A world of all night restaurants, diners, and jazz clubs. We'd have dinners with friends and I'd make funny remarks. The complete opposite of life in rural Oklahoma.

I figured my future girlfriend and I would fight and eventually break up, since that's what always seemed to happen in Joe Jackson songs---lovers were always under stress and tired. It was a fast changing world, and love rarely could withstand it. I remember constantly listening to "Not Here, Not Now," and mourning the end of a relationship I didn't even have. The fantasy really grew for me once I started reading Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney [though I never could quite get into him as well.] I didn't really know what a corporate lawyer did, but I figured I could do it.

Of course, none of that exactly happened. I can't remember when I lost interest in law school, but it was pretty early in my undergraduate career--though I considered it again in my late 20s at once point in a potential escape from the Post Office, which thankfully I ended up not doing after looking into it more and realizing how bad the outlook was for most law school grads. I also took a practice LSAT and bombed it...not just in the "didn't study well enough" sense, but in the sense of "have no idea what this is even about" sense.

So now it's nearly 1:30 AM here and I am going to be a bit closer to 50 at the end of this month and I'm listening to some of those Joe Jackson songs for the first time in probably 20 years or so. I think about what an odd duck I was then even outside the normal realm of oddness. I enjoyed punk rock records and other things weird kids in smaller towns liked, but I had this weird affinity for the jazzier Joe Jackson records--basically white people jazz. I wanted to be a yuppie because it seemed completely different than the world around me, where very few people even worked in offices or had jobs at all. I feel fortunate to have escaped that, and to have escaped my life at the Post Office. I also admit to myself that I am much happier being single again. I became an accountant and at least was able to work in areas where I cared about the mission of my employers. I live in a large city that I enjoy so far, though it doesn't seem that big.

No real point to this trip down Memory Lane, though sometimes I think I'm still looking for that worldly, difficult woman so we can break apart and leave me with with a life of torture and regret.

The book as time travel device.

Even as a younger man, I had an affinity for “middle aged man in trouble” novels, of which there are many. I especially enjoyed those of Larry McMurtry, who wrote excellent novels of male ennui when he wasn’t writing Western [as in cowboy] novels. I especially enjoyed his “Thalia cycle,” which chronicled the lives and loves of the people of a small Texas town through oil booms and busts, beginning in the Fifites and ending in the 00s over five novels written over a four decade span. I believe I've written about them in past posts here.

When I was around 18, I loved the second book, Texasville. In that one, the main characters were in their late 40s. I was especially interested in the various crises and dramas of Duane Moore, the oilman who did not seem to particularly enjoy the oil business, his family, or much else. The occasional affair gives him a momentary spark, but then it’s back to melancholy. He is not in touch with himself, as a man who most likely rarely thinks of such things and perhaps thinks they’re for other people. For whatever reason, as an 18 year old I identified heavily with Duane without understanding why. Perhaps I thought this was what adulthood was like; being tired of things and having the occasional affair to spice things up. Young adult ennui also matches up with middle-aged ennui, despite different motivations. I know some would say that younger people’s angst can’t compare to the stress of the older set-- faced with mortgages, kids and other family pressures, but I’d say their worries are no less valid, just different. But Texasville doesn’t have the same appeal for me it once did—it’s a very dialogue heavy novel, with a lot of short scenes. It’s a very funny book, and I think the charm of it is that despite financial and marital pressures, no one in the book seems to really take anything too seriously. Going broke, ending marriages, having affairs, or feeling like your life has become a movie of which you’ve long ago lost track—none of those things seem to really weigh on anyone in the book except possibly Duane. I’m the same age as Duane in the novel, and perhaps the reason it no longer works as well for me is that I know it’s a glossed over version of what tends to really happen at this age. Things bruise and sometimes even scar. The events of life take a toll no matter how stoic we try to be.

The jewel of the series is the third book, Duane’s Depressed, written in 1999. Without realizing why, Duane suddenly decides to walk everywhere, almost as an act of rebellion against his entire life up to this point. He eventually ends up in therapy. The character is in his early 60s at this point. I was in my late 20s when this book came out and I enjoyed it, but I became especially attached to it in my early 40s and still read it every couple of years. I like the notion of evaluating your life and deciding it isn’t enough or that at least it’s time for something different.

Proust also figures heavily in this novel, as Duane’s therapist advises him to read all of Proust as part of his therapy. In many ways, these [and other] books are like madeleines for me, though when I indulge in them I am specifically trying to invoke memories and imagine the type of person I once was, my routines, responsibilities, and concerns. Life was easier and somehow more difficult at the same time, if that makes sense. My responsibilities were few, but my cares were many, and I seemed less equipped to manage them. I suppose it makes sense that I’d find refuge in the story of someone who suddenly decided they were done with whatever they’d been doing up to that point. Duane’s Depressed speaks to me especially now, as I go through so many personal changes which seem to difficult at first but have already felt worth it. I hope to eventually be as Duane at the end of the book, prepared to travel to places he had always dimly imagined wanting to visit but had never taken the steps to do so. Maybe in another 10-15 years I’ll feel the same about Duane’s Depressed as I do about Texasville, but I doubt that will happen.

Holiness or Hell

I have a memory that may be half fiction. This much is true: I was in a Wal-Mart with my father during the Seventies. This was back when Wal-Mart was more of a regional chain. I remember seeing a blacklight poster of a devil with a pitchfork, in what I presume to be Hell. I was there with my father, and was probably six or seven years old—I gauge this by remembering where the store was located at the time in our little town, since I do remember the building, and that the Wal-Mart moved to a much larger location in the early 80s, that this must have been the late 70s.

The possibly fictional part---I recall my father pointing to the poster and saying, “That’s where you’ll go if you’re bad.” This isn’t too unlike my father, who occasionally took great joy in frightening us as children, but it seems a bit out there for him, so probably not. Hell was something I spent a great deal of time thinking about as a child. I was raised in the Pentecostal church, and Hell was a great motivator. Pentecostals were, as a group, far more interested in the stick than in the carrot, and especially in the idea that said stick would be applied to those who believed differently. I think the idea of love and the hope of Heaven seemed meaningless compared to the relish of non-believers roasting for all Eternity. It was a hard faith in which to grow up.

Baptists had it relatively easy in comparison. We found their theology questionable since they believed in “once saved, always saved.” We believed you could live a Christian life, say “Oh Shit” before dying in a car accident and end up in “the Devil’s Hell,’ as our pastor often called it. Being saved wasn’t really enough either, it was important to “get the Holy Ghost,” and to start speaking in tongues. It wasn’t required, but strongly encouraged, and you were considered spiritually immature and weak if you didn’t get it. Almost all of my family members who attended the church had “gotten it.” When I was around 11 or 12, it seemed like there was somewhat more pressure for those of us in junior high to “get the Spirit.” One summer, my cousin and I went to church camp for a week. That was my first attempt at it….

The camp was terrible, and looking back I see a lot of similarities in what people say about cults when they try to break people down. Instead of normal outdoor activities, we were in church sessions almost all day, so it was like non stop church. They gave us a break during the afternoon where we would just hang out in our bunks, then after dinner we’d be back to church. Eventually, you got worn down, and towards the last couple of nights there was a push to try to get all the kids to get the Holy Ghost. We sang and stood for what seemed like a long time. I had my eyes closed, praying. One of the counselors came up to me and said, “Raise your arms and listen to Jesus!” The pastor at one point tapped my head like he was trying to dislodge the contents of a stubborn bottle of ketchup and commanded me to speak in tongues. Nothing was working. I eventually tired and was lowered to the floor.

I was there for what felt like hours, though it most likely just seemed that way. I tried repeating things I’d heard, I tried praying, I tried everything, but nothing seemed to work and I wasn’t acting or feeling anything like what I’d seen from my fellow campers, not to mention what I routinely saw at my own church on Sunday night. Back home, people routinely spoke in tongues, occasionally interpreted the uttering of others, jumped pews, and ran laps around the sanctuary. As we went home from camp, I figured something must have been wrong with me.

Post Office Characters, Collect Them All #2

I should save this for later, but I’ll probably ditch the character profiles after this anyway. This is about the strangest person I ever met at the Post Office, and possibly the strangest coworker and person I’ve ever dealt with.

I called him Camo Guy. Wearing camo gear was not that unusual at the Post Office. Most guys [and it was always guys] had a jacket or shirt in the traditional pattern. Some might have a hat or pants. Camo Guy took it to another dimension, never mind level. He had berets, desert clothing, and attire from countries that probably hadn’t existed since the end of the Cold War. He had attire suited to seemingly almost any terrain. The only thing I never saw him in was winter gear and I’m surprised he didn’t have some kind of all-white outfit for when it snowed.

His attire was the least strange thing about him.

Camo Guy’s two main interests were karate and Jesus, and he displayed both of his passions throughout the workday. On the flat sorter machine, you would occasionally have to “sweep,” that is, place the full tubs of mail on the conveyor belt and replace them with new ones. It was a good chance to move around a little bit, and boy did he ever. He spent his sweeping time practicing his karate forms, singing hymns, and yelling out his favorite Bible verses. Often, one of his fellow religious comrades who worked at a neighboring machine would shout out verses in response, all evening long. I still remember one hymn he sang, “Jesus on the Mainline,” which is one that the older people used to sing at the church where I grew up. I had never heard it anywhere else until hearing him sing it one night. “Jesus on the mainline, tell Him what you want, Jesus on the mainline, tell Him what you want, Jesus on the mainline, tell Him what you want, Jesus on the mainline now….” I was told later that he went to a smaller Pentecostal church that didn’t have a lot of younger people. Since there were so many televangelists operating out of our city, we had to run a lot of mail from them, and he would often point out ones with whom he had doctrinal disagreements.

Camo Guy was married, I think to someone he’d met while stationed in Germany. She was odd herself, and always wore this awful perfume that smelled like a sour pina colada. She was one of those people where you know something is off, and I disliked working with her. One night she got into it with one of the older regulars, this grey haired biker guy and I think she got walked out of the building after that. I believe they may have split up sometime while I was there.

Most people just worked around him, since although he did his basic job duties he wasn’t all there. People generally didn’t give him a hard time, even in a workforce where most people had anger issues. I don’t know if it was the karate or his childlike behavior softened people or at least made them less inclined to get impatient with him. I rarely saw him cross with anyone. Supervisors would try to get him to pay more attention but they usually just gave up. I sometimes thought he was playing a long con with everyone, convincing them he was too dumb to bother with and so he was left alone. One of the union stewards said they once saw three supervisors all yelling at him once and all he did was sit there and grin. He may have been the smartest guy in the entire building.

I sometimes look up former coworkers in this federal database just to see if they’re still working there, and I see that he’s been driving a truck for the Post Office for some time. This frightens me greatly.

Post Office Characters--Collect Them All #1

I've decided to swerve a bit and take a break from the linear narrative. I encountered a lot of odd people at the Post Office, especially once I got to the mail processing plant where I worked graveyard shift. Here's one of them.

His name was Rex King, so in some ways his name was King King. He was a maintenance mechanic. We had several different machines through which we ran mail. The machines were of various ages, but had one thing in common, they were always breaking down, and when they did,, we had to call an Equipment Technician [or E.T. in postal lingo.] They had varying degrees of expertise. Sometimes it just involved pulling some of the paper residue out of the machine, and sometimes it was more complicated. About six months after I started, they got rid of all the old machines that were probably from the 70s-80s and replaced with a fancy new elaborate flat sorter known as "the 100." It had a conveyor belt, a bunch of flashing lights, and required at least 4 people to operate properly. It was also temperamental as all get out, and would quit working if someone looked at it wrong. So time to call the E.T., which often meant Rex [there was also a gang of three ETs who would occasionally show up, including one of them we called "Gray Sweats" because he always wore the same gray Old Navy shirt and gray sweatpant combination every day, but there was nothing remarkable about him other than that.] There was also Jim the Surly Maintenance Mechanic who swore we were conspiring against him by causing the machine to break at what apparently was the worst possible time for his schedule. but those are pretty much all there are to write about that group.

Rex had a nickname, "the Rexpert." I think he probably was competent enough at fixing the older machines, but could not get his head around the 100, which was way more computerized. If the machine broke down and the Rexpert was up, we were probably going to be down for a while and should start expecting to be sent elsewhere in the facility for a while. One night he had different schematics strewn all over, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. They were supposed to fill out incident reports and I happened to see one of his after a particularly bad breakdown. The last question on the report was "What can be done to prevent this from happening again" and his answer was "No idea."

He was an older guy, with big grey mutton chops and mustache. I ran into him once outside of work, I had the idea that I was going to go to a pancake breakfast one day after work at the Lutheran church down the street. I walk in, and there's the Rexpert, who had put up the flyers at work. So I felt obligated to sit by him for whatever reason, and I awkwardly ate my pancakes while he talks about cults and terrorists [he was interested in that Aum Shinriyiko cult from Japan who had gassed the subways.] As you might guess, conspiracies, cults, guns, and military history were popular topics of conversation among the men of the Post Office, at least at that facility. Once i was in the locker room and saw one of the mail handlers [kind of the Post Office version of longshoremen]reading some kind of John Birch Society newsletter while he was massaging Cornhusker's Lotion into his hands....

"The Benadryl Ain't Workin' (As A Sleep Aid) Anymore

Were I one to write country-western songs, that would be the title of the one I would be writing at this moment.... However, I am not, so there is nothing to do but continue to try to sleep. Good night!

Currently untitled

We excavate
Digging through bones
Shooting pains
from phantom limbs
removed years ago.
We hold tight
Only to let go.

This is part of a slightly longer poem that was published in a zine back in 1995 [I think.] I don't have a copy anymore, and no longer like a lot of it from what I can remember, but I still remembered the lines that I still liked, so I decided to just re-do it [last two lines are new.]

Postal Days, Part 2

The Post Office had its share of characters, even at the encoding center, which I later learned wasn’t the “real” Post office, or at least that’s what the other postal employees thought. As I mentioned, I had a hard time doing much socializing as a young person [I was 24 when I started] due to the work schedule.

Tulsa [where this all happened] was not really a young single person’s town to begin with, and most young people left for greener pastures as soon as they could. Those of us who were stuck there had a tough time unless we got into things like church or country line dancing. Religious types were predominant in Tulsa. Several televangelists were based there, and one of them had a “university” for people who wanted to become ministers themselves. My workplace had a lot of these students, and they would usually try to get you to attend their church or would preach to you. No one did anything about it since it was the Bible belt.

There were also a lot of LGBT employees…that was one thing I did like about the Post Office, it was fairly progressive as far as employing a diverse workforce. One of the associate supervisors was a leather daddy type [I heard later that he’d actually been in leather magazines.] After I’d been there almost a year, I made one friend, a gay woman who was pretty butch. We had similar tastes in books and music, mainly because I liked a lot of women authors. She noticed I was reading Bastard Out of Carolina one day and I guess that made her decide I might be okay. I recently got in touch with her on Facebook after well over a decade. We usually would have new groups of transitional employees starting every so often, and she often would scope out women she found attractive. She seemed to have good instincts for those who might be receptive, for she had several affairs with coworkers while she was there.

There were a lot of single men there, like me, and they would often try to put the moves on new female coworkers, especially the ones that were young. Even the married ones would occasionally try something—one married guy I knew had a massive crush on one young woman [admittedly quite attractive] but he had a creepy sort of awkwardness about it. He would often listen to techno music and bounce up and down in his chair while he typed. People didn’t like to sit next to him due to the distraction. I never really participated in trying to come on to new employees. There was one older punk rock lady who I probably should have gone out with, but I was too chicken and the timing wasn't good.

Until I met my one friend there, I hung out with a group of older women who had all started when I did. I think they kind of saw me as a surrogate son. They were kind and nice to be around, and really funny. One of them, Nancy, was a larger woman who was always complaining about her husband. “One night he just wouldn’t get out of my face and I had to choke him.” We had an employee appreciation day where people brought their families. and I saw the husband, who was a mean looking little man who probably deserved to be choked on a regular basis. Most of them eventually left. The next few years went on pretty much the way I’ve described so far. Steady work from 4-12:30, Monday through Friday. Overtime during the three weeks leading up to Christmas [though I never worked as many hours as I did that first season.] Lots of CDs and books on tape. I remember listening to several John Irving novels on tape, and a lot of john Grisham. Don’t know how many hours of NPR I heard. But as I said, we were a stopgap measure. When I started, there were something 25-30 sites like ours throughout the US. But then the scanning technology got better, and sites started to close. Rumors began going around, and in late 1999, we began facing the inevitable….

Postal Days, Part 1.

And no, I did not have the temptation to name this “Going Postal.”

When I was faltering as an undergrad, at one point my mother said maybe I should drop out of school and try to get a job at the Post Office, because it didn’t seem like school was really helping me with anything. I blanched at that advice, and did manage to graduate [basically a B average student—had no real motivation to do better and only really buckled down if a class interested me] but had no idea what to do after that. After several months of struggle, I enrolled in a paralegal program at a nearby university [also incurring my first student loan, but that’s beside the point.] I then attempted to find a job as a paralegal in different places but it looked like I was about to have still more months of struggle when I saw an ad in the paper for data entry jobs at the Post Office. Guess I could do worse, I thought. I can at least do this until I find something better. It’ll probably only be for a year or so…..

I stayed nearly seven years, working in different capacities. It was my first full-time job.

I worked at a Remote Encoding Center. We existed as a short term solution while technology was being developed. The letter sorting machines could read a lot of typewritten addresses but had trouble with handwritten letters and certain typewritten fonts. As the mail was ran through the machine, it was scanned and the images were sent to us. I’d see a picture of the letter on my screen, I would type some address information [using specialized abbreviations and special keys] and that would tell the machine where the letter was supposed to go.

Through most of my time there, I worked from 4 PM to 12:30 AM, and after a while I got weekends off. I was a “transitional employee” which meant I got a straight hourly wage with no benefits, and I got furloughed for a week every year. They always hired a ton of us transitional employees to gear up for the holidays. We got an ergonomic break every 55 minutes, alternating between 5 and 10 minutes.

In many ways, still the best job I ever had as far as schedule and being able to just work and not have to worry about other people’s problems. I could listen to music or whatever I wanted on my headphones. I listened to so many books on tape from the library, usually mysteries. The more literary stuff I read didn't seem to work on tape for whatever reason. During Christmas time we would work 12 hour days and I’d get off work at 4 AM sometimes. I’d listen to the BBC all night. The first Christmas I didn’t know if they would keep me on after the holiday so I tried to get all the hours I could. I worked 12 hours a day straight for 13 days. I fell asleep in my chair that Christmas when I was visiting my parents.

They did keep me and things were pretty good. I typed [they called it "keying"] quickly and was accurate most of the time. I was always afraid my hours would get cut, but they never did. We even had overtime. I had my week’s furlough but was told to return. I listened to a lot of punk rock CDs and NPR. A lot of the time if I really liked a song I'd put it on repeat. One night I played "From Her to Eternity" for an hour straight. The job had negative parts too, though. The work schedule meant I never could do anything in the evenings, since those were the peak hours for mail in the processing plant. I did get weekends off after a while which helped. Some of the supervisors were hard to deal with, and would make up rules just to show how much control they had over everyone. The job of supervisor wasn’t that demanding, they mainly just sat in the office and looked at the monitors letting them know about the images that were coming in, so there was plenty of time for them to mess with people.

That fall there was big news, the union [which most of us joined] had won a grievance and they were going to have to make several of the transitional employees “regulars,” that is, full time permanent postal employees. It would all be determined by our scores on the exam we took the year before. I kept waiting to see if the supervisor would ever call me into the office, and eventually he did. He was a big guy named Ray with a bouffant haircut and a temper that would get out of control sometimes, though he was good-natured most of the time. He asked if I wanted to be a regular, and I accepted, though it meant I was probably going to be at the Post Office longer than I originally planned...and also not always at this job.

Beans and Tea

We got good at arithmetic
Writing down figures each week
On notepads taken from hotels
Where we’d stayed in better times
Some adding, mostly subtracting
Blackboard equations and formulae
Trying to engineer another week
Our fingers sifting for rocks and hulls


Sitting down to our brown beans and tea
Thinking of the people Grandpa talked about
when he spoke of the Thirties
About people who lived in caves out in the hills


Shopping became simple
We walked past all the bright packages
and only bought in bulk
All we cared about was
Having our beans and tea
and reading our library books

The Cold War Never Really Ended

“The Cold War never really ended”
Said my cousin the Air Force Major
While he drove me from the airport at midnight
to see our dying grandmother back in 2009
I always remember what he said, and wanted to use that line.
A poem about a couple whose words were like skidding on black ice
Public words that encoded private suffering
But the line no longer speaks, or else the world can no longer hear it
And my cousin, now a lieutenant colonel, is soon to retire

The angst lifts....

You get used to everything eventually. I think living in the pandemic situation kind of made me get past a lot of what I was dealing with a lot sooner than it might have otherwise. True, my personal life was in shambles, but so was everyone else's. Everything has slowed down. I feel like it's somewhat easier to get used to being here because nothing is normal, people still aren't around much and it's fairly easy to get around, if you can think of somewhere to go. New job seems to be fairly laid back, though it may be ramping up soon. We'll see how demanding it is. I guess I've worked long enough now to where it doesn't really matter to me that much, or else maybe work problems just seem to be the least of my concerns. Gradually getting to know people online. Maybe the whole forced social isolation thing is working in my favor. I'm an old pro at this.

Learning to Live with Myself

Yes, let's just name every post after a Merle Haggard song.

Working from home. I've been at this job nearly two weeks and have just been doing training on my laptop, using my TV tray and my WalMart folding chair. That's my only furniture other than an air mattress. Suppose to have all my other stuff moved here maybe next month.

The first weekend was the hardest, when I first got here. It's still not easy. I don't go anywhere other than my immediate area here. I like the town I'm in. There's a lumber company nearby that looks like something out of Twin Peaks. I walk along the river. Other than the occasional trip for grocery shopping, I try not to go anywhere if I can't get there on foot. There's public transit here, but I feel like it's irresponsible to travel that way unless it's important.

I may have already had COVID and not really known it. My wife had bad symptoms [though no fever, so her doctor couldn't test her.] I had a mild sore throat/congestion and a slight pain in my lungs, but that subsided eventually. We'll probably never know. My parents' area in Oklahoma has been hit really hard considering how small a town it is. They think they had an outbreak at the small country church they attend, even though they quit holding services a couple of months ago. My parents most likely had it, they were both pretty sick but have recovered. They tested negative, but I think were starting to recover by the time they were tested.

I don't know if I like my job or not. It feels like it hasn't really started. My life here hasn't really started. I'm only sad some of the time now. But it's hard to get used to. 2020 seems to be all about getting used to things that we didn't think we'd ever have to get used to, on every level.

Wishing All These Old Things Were New

This is a 2000s era Merle Haggard song. The title makes you think it's about regret and lost opportunities, but it's really about the desire to take up one's old addictions again, as if it were the first time, and bemoaning sobriety. Leave it to Merle to swerve into bad behavior.

Nevertheless, the title resonates for me as it first appears. I do wish I could go back again. I think a lot of my life has been spent trying to re-do things and start over. I transferred colleges like nobody's business as an undergrad, each time hoping that the next place would be more of a fit. I didn't have the experience of returning to the same college after summer break until my fourth year of school [and of course, due to all the transferring, I was only a junior by then.]

I went back to school to become an accountant, and only after about nine years and five different jobs do I feel like I may have succeeded, but I see the same pattern of leaving. Now I may be about to start what will probably be my last job at least for a long while, maybe the last ever.

Always trying to move on, looking for a better place. I married someone who had the same habit, and that caused an exponential increase in the behavior.

Now as I'm starting to approach the last decade of what could be called middle age, I may be finally somewhat settled. Depends on if the old things can remain old, and if new things can be learned. Guess we will see.

I'm trying to post more. I got nothing better to do these days.

Quarantine days

Ended up not flying and just renting a place sight unseen. I leave in a couple of days. Ending this chapter of my life. Feel like I'm going backward, but at least I'm moving to a new city.

The quarantine really starts now. I'll be living alone, and working from home until things change. Sleeping on an air mattress. Will probably buy a lawn chair or something. Gotta rebuild everything. Gotta start over. Still in a better position than I was, in some ways.

The Micro and the Macro of Misery

Several years ago, my father-in-law suddenly felt and looked very unwell. It was very difficult to get an official diagnosis, but we eventually learned he was terminally ill and did not have long. We were all watching television one morning and trying to adjust to the news when we saw the footage of the tsunami in Japan. It felt like the world was ending.

Now in a time of great personal upheaval, I feel that way once again. It's amazing how quick the wheels come off, and how the center not only cannot hold, but maybe wasn't even there to begin with.

I have to fly out of state soon to scout for a new place to live, and have no idea what I'll be facing. I'll be travelling from one virus hotspot to another. I'll be starting my new job in just under a month and I'm pretty sure they're not going to delay for anything. They are paying for the move, so I'd rather find a place I want to stay at for at least a few years. I'm going to start making calls tomorrow and I guess I'll have a better idea how it's going to go. It's a place I always wanted to live, but I'm probably going to spend a lot of my time this weekend in my hotel room eating takeout. Might go walk around if it's safe to do so....

It's all happening....

In a month or so, my whole life will be different.

What I had is fading away just like the radio signal as I drive to whatever lies ahead. Memories like the ghost voices from faraway places that somehow make their way to me in the middle of the night. It’s a frequency that reaches me only at night, when sound travels differently. News of people and places I don’t know and never will. Songs and singers that seem familiar but don’t quite sound right, like half-realized cover versions.

It's odd how life works. You want something for years and years, you move on and forget about it, then somehow it comes to you when you're not even sure if you want it anymore.

I'm going back to a lifestyle I had for my young adult years. I feel like it's a revival of a TV show but with the original actors. With no acknowledgement that the actors have aged or changed in anyway. Senior citizen Henry Winkler in his old leather jacket, risking injury when he smacks that jukebox at Arnold's.

Slacking again

I swore I would keep this up and do a better job. I guess I'm doing about the same as some of the other blogs I follow these days [mainly RVers.]

Filling out the same forms and paperwork as I've done in the past. The funny thing is all my info is saved from the previous two times, so I have stuff in there from 2012. Who says the government is inefficient?

Excited for and depressed about future changes at the same time, if that makes any sense, and it probably doesn't.

I need to go back to writing about books. Here's my list of favorite books I read last year:

Bowlaway, Elizabeth McCracken

The Border, Don Winslow

The Bird King, G. Willow WIlson

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer

Norco '80, Peter Houlahan

Rabbits for Food, Binnie Kirshenbaum

Marilou is Everywhere, Sarah Elaine Smith

Mostly Dead Things, Kristen Arnett

Hollow Kingdom, Kira Jane Buxton

A Cosmology of Monsters,Shaun Hamill

The Lager Queen of Minnesota, J. Ryan Stradal

Hollow Kingdom was my absolute favorite, a post-apocalyptic novel with a crow as protagonist. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee was probably my favorite nonfiction.

A Brief History of Where I've Been for the last 8 years, Part Two...

The job was located on tribal land which isn't that unusual in my home state, but I never really worked that directly on tribal land before. This tribe was a small-to-medium sized tribe. They had a section of land on the edge of the small town named after them. It was a mix of new and old buildings, the old ones obviously going back to the late 19th century. Many of them were boarded up but some were still in use. There was one that was more like a house that had been boarded up. I was told that had been a boarding school. Often wondered how much bad energy was in those buildings.

The tribe was always building something, new bridges, a senior center, a new gathering place for their pow wows, which were always the major events for their community. They had a police station which was one of the newer buildings. There was a dog who had the run of the place. The tribal employees paid for her food and shelter. She had a fancy dog house behind the police station. When the weather turned cold, the dispatcher at the police station would put a sweater on her, though this was a long gradual process that started in the fall. The dog occasionally was allowed inside the police station, though I was walking by once when I saw her being shooed out the door by the dispatcher, who was giving her a dirty look. Her name was Ju-da-ke, which was "girl" in the tribal language.

The people were probably the friendliest of anywhere I've worked. I'm still in touch and friends with many there, and they helped me with references at this most recent job. I often wish I hadn't left, though it was not really my idea to leave. I have many happy memories of walking outside, past the old buildings and wondering about how they might have looked 100 years before.

My office roommate was Osage, and always kept me informed on the latest goings on with their tribe. I learned a lot about their traditions as well...yearly dances for each of their three districts. She often complained about the Osage from out of state having too much sway in tribal elections. "They vote these people in but we're the ones who have to live with them." This is a common complaint with many of the larger tribes, including mine. Their chief was removed from office while I was there, and that was the talk of the clinic that day.

Many of the employees wore military uniforms to work each day. They were part of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. This was a quasi-military branch that held positions in many of the healthcare facilities operated by the federal government. You've heard of the Surgeon General. These are the other people in the army. In that particular region of the agency, the commissioned officers more or less ran the entire organization. I've since learned that this greatly varies by region, though at the headquarters level it is also like that. Generally, the officers were in the healthcare professions, though they also were in I.T. and engineering. My coworker did not like the Commissioned Corps. Her husband and son were combat veterans and she disliked how many of the corps members thought they were equivalent to the military. They also were much more expensive to employ than the regular "civilian" employees. When we had a government shutdown in 2013, most of us had to work unpaid--except for the Commissioned Corps because they were technically considered military and exempt from the shutdown.

My wife finally joined me just over a year later. We bought a house in Tulsa, which was probably a mistake. I had to commute a long way to work each day, about 75 minutes each way. The job didn't pay as well as I'd hoped, and we were struggling financially. The job market in OKlahoma was not that great for public health jobs, and my wife struggled to find anything above minimum wage. That's the thing about a lot of these states that claim low unemployment---most of the jobs are in the low wage sector. She was offered a position with her previous employer, a promotion, but it would be in the Bay Area. We had to prepare to leave and move back--just a few months after we'd moved all our possession out of our multiple storage units from California.

To Be Continued, eventually....

It's too late to turn back, here we go....

Took the first step in a major life change today. Trying not to be maudlin. This year I'm officially going to undergo at least three of the major life stressors that a person can have. Hopefully no more than three.

So I most likely got the job that I interviewed for. I was told I'm the top candidate, and they contacted my current supervisor at the job I have now [not something I was thrilled with but my manager actually was really nice about it and promised not to tell anybody else, especially not the CFO] and I understand it's being passed on to HR now. I'll probably get a call sometime next week. If my previous experience with this agency is an indicator, I'll then get a tentative offer and will undergo a background check, and then will get an official offer and a start date. I hope the process could drag out later in the spring, but it's more likely that I have maybe five or six weeks.

It's a lot to digest. I know the job is going to be difficult and I'll have to work harder than I've been working. At my last couple of jobs I've tried to kind of work at an average pace and only really worked hard when I needed to meet a deadline. I didn't ask for additional work and tried to really have downtime as much as I could. I know I can't do that anymore.

This will probably be my Forever Job. I'm happy enough with the pay scale to retire here and I'll have the option to do so in about 15 years though it'll depend on health and if I want to try to make a little more if I stick around longer. My past career with the Post Office helps because I already have time in the retirement system. Still, I'm not really happy about it and I think I'll probably be ambivalent about the whole thing until I actually am settled in.

Watch the whole thing fall through. Doubtful, though. The funny thing is I'm actually getting along a lot better with my current manager [who has only been my manager a few weeks] and have been somewhat happy at work over the last couple of week.

Speaking of the Post Office, I don't believe I ever have written much about that, and maybe I should start. Or maybe I should continue to catch up over the last seven years. Funny that I called it a Brief History of the Last Seven Years. RIP Andy Gill. Going to go play some Gang of Four right now.

This trip down Memory Lane interrupted....

I guess this is full circle. After many, many posts [see the archives] of me writing about job interviews, I have a new one. Agency for which I once worked, in a location where I've always wanted to live. I think I have a good shot, though it's going to complicate my life a lot if I get it...similar to seven years ago when I first took a job with this same agency. But it would be good to return, even if it's a new location in a new city.

Things are different now. I have an okay job and have a lot more experience than I did back in the late 00s/early teens. I'm way better at interviewing. I'd prefer this job to the one I have now, but the timing as usual is all wrong. But sometimes we have to just go along with it.

A Brief History of where I've been the last 8 years, part one:

"Previously, on De Minimis..." Sick of unemployment and underemployment, I'd taken a job with a federal agency in my home state, and had to live apart from my wife for just over a year. I was fortunate to be able to rent a furnished house in a town about 30 miles from the health clinic where I'd be working. It was a college town, home to one of the major universities in my state. The house also had three cats--my landlady had adopted the cats and was trying [not very hard] to find homes for them. She had a family member come by every so often to change litter boxes and keep them supplied with food, but I often took care of a lot of the feeding. My wife joked that it was like I was renting from the cats.

I was an accountant. I worked with an older lady who was planning to retire in a few years. I was the succession plan. She had worked there a long time and had worked all over the country for different agencies over the years. Her husband was retired but had been a CEO of different clinics and hospitals in the Native healthcare system. He had started out as a Medical Assistant, working for the tribe that lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. She said the government paid for the helicopter to take them down into the canyon, but if they wanted to leave it was on their own dime. She cried and cried when they first got there due to the isolation, but when they left a few years later she said that she was very sad to leave.

The pace was very slow, which suited me fine. The people were friendly. Although the clinic was located on one tribe's land, there were 10-15 other tribes who were located in the area. It was an interesting mix of people. I had never lived or spent much time in that part of the state, so it was a new experience for me. I liked the college town I was in, but felt bored much of the time. I often got depressed on weekend and missed my wife, who was trying to disentangle us from our various obligations in Detroit of the West. It took longer than we thought.

As Harvey Pekar once wrote....

"Brand new decade, same old bullshit."

I'm still on the fence about whether to contribute more to this blog or to just start a new one, but right now I'm thinking I'll just stay here. If anyone does end up reading this, just know there's a lot of years of posts about being unemployed during the Great Recession, trying to find work and failing, and reading a ton of library books. Working now, but still looking for another job. Lots of personal upheaval this year though I'm not one to go into details about it. Been reading blogs by full time RV people, and feeling the urge to wander, to do something different, to hit the reset button [again.] My buddy Ben Hamper wrote about his father having "a habitual lean for the nearest exit" and that's how I often feel Never mind the reset button, I'd like to hit the fast forward button and move on to a year from now.